


Trepidation

by hyphyp



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Immortality, M/M, Sci-Fi Elements, brief James Bond/Others, brief Q/Others, brief mention of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:49:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6752740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyphyp/pseuds/hyphyp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Concerning an immortal wizard and a man who made a wish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trepidation

On Wednesday they have drinks and watch the shuttles blaze hot through the sky, up and out of the atmosphere.

“More and more of them are going,” James says, because Q has that look on his face that means he’s not sure how he feels about what’s happening in the mortal realm.

“It was inevitable,” Q says. “I could see things tilting this way for a long time.”

“But you don’t like it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, would I?” Q says, a little petulant.  He picks up the cocktail James has just finished mixing for him and sips at it slowly. “I can’t follow. I feel like a mother watching her stupid children dive headfirst out of the nest.”

James chuckles and ruffles Q’s hair with his broad hand. Q scowls but lets him.

The shuttles leave little white cloud trails in their wakes. So many of them have been taking off today that the sky is a mess of crossing zig-zags.

“This reminds me of when you dabbled in palmistry,” James says.

“It wasn’t dabbling. You make it sound like a silly hobby. Didn’t I predict your first three children?”

“Can you read these, too, or is your fortune telling limited to organic things?”

“Oh, I see. You’re challenging me.” Q sets down his drink and tilts his head up to look against the glare of the sun. “I can read them,” he says after a moment. “After all, they’re made of the things that the palms of humans made. It’s simple substitution.”

“Then what do they say, oh mighty wizard?”

Q closes his eyes and leans back against the cool grass of the hill. The sunlight is warm on his skin, the gentle breeze tempering the heat. He can hear the sound of glass clinking against the metal tray and James shifting at his side. Q wants to lie here and nap for a long, long time.

“They say they still have use of me,” he murmurs sleepily. “At least for a while yet.”

“And what about me?” A shadow crosses Q’s face as James leans over him. “Do they still have use for a killer?”

“I suspect they’ll always have use for killers,” Q says.

James hums thoughtfully.

Not long after that they both fall asleep.

 

* * *

 

James’ first memory of Q is in the trenches. It’s a cloudy memory – the pain was immense and he’d lost a lot of blood. When the smoke and dust had dissipated, though, he could see the night sky was crisp and clear and the stars were out. It was the same sky he’d always looked at, but for some reason it felt distant and nostalgic, like a lost thing unexpectedly found. It was like the night sky from his childhood.

Unbidden, the memory that came to mind as he lay dying in the mud wasn’t of any of the people he held dear – his brothers in arms, the various women he had loved, his few friends, his long dead family – but of a comet he’d seen once, when he was very small. It’d been so bright. It hadn’t dragged a tail after itself like a kite, but instead seemed to be a hard diamond thing that scraped sparks of rust from off the flat surface of the sky. It was a finger dragging through thick layers of old, old dust. It was terrible and wonderful; sublime.

_It’s a shame,_ James thought, staring up at the fading sky through blood and dirt caked eyelids. _I wish I could have lived to see that comet again._

That was when Q appeared. He was barefoot, dressed in only a thin white shirt and trousers, and glowed pale like the moon. He leaned over James and blocked out the sky, eclipsed the whole universe with his soft, gleaming face.

“My, my,” Q said. “What a mess.”

Even then, barely conscience, James knew Q wasn’t talking about death or the war. He was seeing something beyond that. He was seeing certain future things as they snapped into place and became, all at once, inevitable.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes a comet comes back around once a decade. Sometimes it comes once a century. A few of them are slow, though, and they fling themselves far, far away, out into the void. It takes a thousand years for them.

James’ comet takes longer.

 

* * *

 

In the beginning, James was bad at being sort of immortal. Q let him be bad at it because Q himself had never fully taken to real immortality. And maybe he felt a little guilty, especially when James fell into one of his moods and started yelling and breaking things or, worse, grew cold and silent and didn’t eat or sleep or move for days on end. And maybe there are things you can’t teach someone, like trying to show a fish how not to be a fish. You just have to let them find out on their own, no matter how painful the process, that the things they once swam in are now only fit for drowning.

“I hate you,” James would say sometimes, out of nowhere.

They’d be sitting in a restaurant watching new cars rush past or walking along a street where maybe James had once belonged but no longer and James would say it like he was pointing out the weather.

_Well, I can’t help that, can I?_ Q would think a little sadly. _Even I can’t tell the rain when and where to fall._

 

* * *

 

“So what does a wizard do, anyway?” James had asked once they’d returned from Belgium.

“I don’t know what other wizards do,” Q said. “I’ve never met one.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I grant wishes,” Q said. “But only when they’re made at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way.”

“Even when they aren’t made in earnest?” James asked.

“Sincerity doesn’t have much to do with intention or result,” Q said vaguely. He waved his hand as though trying to summon an explanation that would make sense. “You can have a sincere emotion but the feelings won’t necessarily match the words you use, because language is flawed like that. But then I can only work with the literal material I’m given. So a farmer might want his crops to grow, but if he wishes for rain then of course it will sometimes come out as a flood.”

“Well,” said James. “I wish you had let me die back in that hole where you found me. Is that earnest and literal enough for you?”

Q took his glasses off and wiped the lenses with the cloth he kept in his pocket. He considered what to say. Every possibility exhausted him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “I can’t do anything about it now.” Belatedly, he added, “Sorry,” but didn’t really mean it.

When Q finally put his glasses back on, James was looking at him, and it was clear that he knew.

 

* * *

 

The human population on Earth grows smaller and smaller now. Q and James roam together. There are always wishes to grant, but more often than not these days they’re wishes to leave, and few of them come out precisely. Q has to make people disappear completely sometimes. He snuffs them out of existence like pinching the flame out of a candle and when he’s done James kisses the singe out of his fingertips, carefully, reverently.

The worst of them are the ones that have always been hard – the wishes he wants to grant but can’t. And they’ve become harder since James, because James has never been able to understand and probably never will.

“Magic is finicky,” Q tries to explain. “And it’s not really mine. I only guide it for a little while. It makes up its own mind about how the universe ought to be ordered, I think. Or maybe it’s completely random. I don’t know. Either way, what I want very rarely makes a difference.”

“Why do you do it at all?” James asks, in a different way from how he used to. Before, it was a demand. Now, it’s a plea. He grabs onto Q and holds him, as if to anchor them both against the cold progression of time and all that hangs suspended within it.

“Because it’s inevitable,” Q says. He buries his face in the crook between James’ neck and shoulder and inhales deeply. “And, on occasion, I find myself rewarded.”

 

* * *

 

In the beginning, they stayed in London. Q opened a small café and pretended his money came from the till, because that was easier than explaining to James what happens when you live for a long, long time while needing absolutely nothing – people get further away, and objects start to cling. So Q served coffee and tea and pastries and granted wishes here and there, when the mood struck him and he was able.

And James. James brooded and slept with anyone he could get his hands on and drank more than a mortal man could tolerate. At night sometimes Q would hear crashing sounds in the shop downstairs and the next morning the windows and display cases would be smashed to pieces. All the dishes would be broken, the coffee beans and tea leaves spilled across the tile floor and pulverized, mixed together with glass and dirt.

In short, James raged.

Q said nothing. He cleaned the shop by hand, on his own, and paid for the repairs and replacements. He knew what James didn’t know yet, that anger eventually runs out.

It’s too exhausting to maintain.

 

* * *

 

Before James was born, before London was a city, before England was a place on a map, Q was already alone and long accustomed to it. His memories don’t go all the way back to his beginning, but if they did he thinks they would be like the memories of stars, empty and echoing and full of unrestrained fire. He remembers that sometimes he was so alone all he could do was break the bones in his hands and let the pain keep him company.

There were humans here and there, and when he touched them they were warm and soft. They seemed unbearably fragile and it terrified Q to see them live and die with the speed of mayflies. Still, he touched them. He took a little of their pain and for a while that would keep him company instead of his own. It was a fair exchange.

Sometimes he pretended he himself was mortal, dipped his feet into the terrifying depths of their emotions. Their lives were shot, but sank impossibly deep. Sometimes, despite knowing the contact would disintegrate even as it was made, he also let them touch him back.

Maybe that was his weakness. And maybe James, warm and soft and unbreakable, made him weak.

One morning in London, Q woke up expecting the embrace of the man he had gone to bed with the previous night. The arms around him were frigid. Q was lying in a lake of something thick and sticky, seeping into the mattress and his skin.

The shop was whole, not a spoon out of place, and James was sitting at the counter drinking a cup of coffee while reading the morning paper. He looked up as Q came down the stairs, his left side dyed deep crimson, his hair matted down to his scalp.

James’ face was flat as he took Q’s appearance in. Then his lips stretched into a cold parody of a smile. “For the rest of my life,” he said, “I’m going to make you regret what you’ve done to me. I’ll make you hate me as much as I hate you, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it, will there?”

“You’re a child,” Q said. “You don’t know the first thing about regret or hate.”

“I was a soldier,” James snapped. “I know plenty.”

“Right,” said Q with mock indulgence.

He eyed James critically for a moment, noted the small spatter of blood hidden in the shadow of his collar and the hot defiance in his hard blue eyes. From the start, James’ wish had been horrible. Q had never wanted to inflict his burden of living on anyone else. But this was the first time Q found James pitiful. He was pathetic. He was a killer. He was painfully, obviously human, with three thousand years to sink into his unending depths, and it was with a dull sort of acceptance that Q realized that no matter what James did or felt or believed, inevitably, Q would fall in love.

“There’s baking soda in the pantry,” he said as he turned to go back up the stairs to the corpse in his bed. “You can use it to clean the stains out of your shirt.”

 

* * *

 

After London, they traveled. In the old days Q would have bartered his skills in exchange for shelter, food, and transportation, but the world had shifted immensely in just a handful of decades. James, who had never known anything else, was better at navigating it, and Q found it easier in the long run to let James have his way. So it was James who led and Q who followed here and there across the globe.

They only ever stopped for long when James fell in love.

There was Tracy first, and then Vesper later, and a slew of other women (and a handful of men) sprinkled in between. Q watched with something like curiosity or maybe envy. Again and again, James was forced to stay stagnant, preserved, as those he loved grew old and died, leaving him behind, and yet he never seemed to become jaded or feel regret. (Though it was telling, perhaps, that he only ever married the once.)

In total, James had twelve children, though what happened to them after they moved on neither James nor Q ever found out. James always expected Q to get angry with him on those occasions, but he never did. Q knew better than James did that some things are merciful, and that other things are merely necessary.

 

* * *

 

Vesper was the last.

“I’m sorry,” James said, after she died.

“For what?” Q asked.

“For that man I killed while – while you were together.”

Q blinked and then slowly remembered. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I never even knew his name.”

James shook his head. “It does matter.”

“Why?”

Q’s face was placid, guileless. James looked at him, really looked, probably for the very first time.

“You mean that,” he said. “You honestly don’t know.”

It was raining, and they were sitting on the bank of a deep, fast moving river, both of them drenched to the bone. Q was as pale as he had been that first night, nearly translucent, as if he was only just being kept, by a thread of physicality, from drifting off into the air and evaporating entirely.

“Q,” James said. “How long have you been alive?”

“I can’t remember,” Q said honestly.

James looked away, back toward the distant shore where the police and EMTs had converged on Vesper’s small, broken form. They hadn’t noticed James and Q yet, but it was only a matter of time. They’d have to leave soon. Q thought they should leave Europe completely for a while, maybe head somewhere warm, where James couldn’t speak the language and would have a harder time falling in love.

“What do you think about Hong Kong?” he asked, easing up onto his feet. “Or Sri Lanka? You know I hate to fly, but there are trains and boats, and we’ve the time.”

When James finally looked back again, the pity had left his eyes, but there were traces of it in the creases around his mouth. There was fear there, too.

Q felt James begin to think, _I wish…_

The thought fell away, unfinished, and Q was grateful, at least, for that.

“Let’s try somewhere inland,” James said. “Like Mali.”

 

* * *

 

There are a few conversations that they’ve had since the beginning that they continue to have, even now:

“Was the comet really that beautiful?” Q asks.

James replies, “It was.”

James asks, “How long until the comet comes back and I finally die?”

And Q counts out the years in his head and tells him.

“That long?” James says.

The number shrinks; the meanings change. Otherwise, they repeat.

 

* * *

 

Hundreds of years passed before James started helping Q grant wishes. When he did, it was a relief. James could do things Q couldn’t. He could get angry when it wouldn’t make a difference. He could have hope when there wasn’t a point. Also, he could kill. James was very good at killing.

They were in Alaska one winter when the days were so short that sometimes Q wondered if the night sky had swallowed them whole. It was cold and frozen and Q granted the wishes of trees. James looked doubtful, but followed silently behind as Q trudged through the snow, running his hands over each trunk and murmuring spells to make their roots sink deeper, to make the axe and chainsaw turn away.

In the little town where they were staying the people gave them strange looks but mostly left them alone. On their last day, a woman approached them, her eye swollen shut at the knotted center of a massive bruise.

“I heard you could grant wishes,” she said.

“But I can’t grant your wish,” Q said. “I’m not strong enough for that.”

He regretted saying so, even if it was true.

“What did she want?” James asked after she had gone.

“Freedom,” Q said. “Her mind was screaming it. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it yourself.”

That night James disappeared and came back in the early hours of the morning covered in blood.

“Her husband’s been in a bear attack,” he said, stripping off his clothes and dumping them in the filled tub to soak.

“That’s a bit unseasonal, don’t you think?” Q asked.

James shrugged, flippant, and Q was reminded that, of the two of them, it was James who had only one rule in the universe left to follow.

 

* * *

 

Before James, Q was always losing track of time. It didn’t matter to him the way it did to mortals. Counting the days and months and years would have been like counting each step in an endless march. After James, he keeps track a little more carefully, and what he notices worries him. Everything is happening too fast.

“They have machines now that look and think like humans do,” James tells him one day. “They say they can even fall in love.”

“Do they die, too?”

James hesitates. “No,” he says. “They’re self-sufficient, and they last forever.”

Q goes quiet at that. James draws him a hot bath and washes his hair, gently massages the shampoo into Q’s scalp and then rinses him clean. Still, Q seems disturbed, so James towels him dry and wraps him tightly in a thick robe and for a long time they lie together in the dark with the curtains over the windows all drawn shut.

Q clings to him.

“I don’t remember being born,” he says. “What if I’m just –” He breaks off.

“Don’t think like that,” James says. He presses Q’s hand up against Q’s bare breast. “You have a heartbeat. You’re alive.”

“There’s something wrong with me, James,” Q says. “Everything about me is – wrong. And I can’t.”

“Don’t cry,” James says. “Hey. Don’t cry.”

There is a flicker there, a flash that hovers unformed in the shallows of James’ mind, the breathy start of _I wish…I wish…_. But Q lets out a choking sob that utterly drowns it out.

 

* * *

 

When they return to London at last it has grown into something monstrous and unrecognizable and then emptied utterly again, into a husk. Here and there stubborn nature has begun making advances into the cracked spaces between metal and concrete. The streets are silent and half wild.

“Aren’t you afraid that one day we’ll be completely alone?” James asks.

They’re sitting on the roof of an old building, watching the multitudes of satellites and space stations and star-ships twinkle as they dart in and out of the gaps between skyscrapers.

“Not really,” Q says. “They haven’t left forever, after all. It might take a while, but everything always comes back around.”

And there’s no such thing as ‘alone,’ anyway. Not really. Not so long as he has James.

 

* * *

 

Falling in love was inevitable. Q had predicted it and always known it, known that if there was a single person in the universe he could ever feel a thing for, it would be James. Nonetheless, it caught him by surprise. It snatched at him like ghost hand out of a dark corner on a dark, moonless night.

Q was caught up in a war in the Americas between two drug cartels. One of the rival kingpins made the right wish in the right place for power and Q granted it by becoming a tool himself. James was furious. He disappeared for a long time, leaving Q stuck and aching. Every spell he wove was poison and they seemed to peel out of his bones and flesh. He was being flayed alive.

James was only gone a month, but it felt as though Q had gone back in time, to the days of eternal loneliness.

“Can’t you do anything about it?” James asked once he returned. He was still angry, but not at Q.

“I can’t grant my own wishes,” Q said. “If I could…” In the privacy of his thoughts, he wished for something foolish. Out loud, he said, “I wish they were both dead.”

James frowned. Then he smiled.

 

* * *

 

Q has lived in contact with humans for long enough that sometimes he wonders if there are stories about him. He wonders what they say, whether they venerate or vilify, whether they’re the kind of stories that are told or the kind that are written and then abandoned, unread. He doesn’t have an opinion about it one way or the other. He’d just as soon go unremarked upon. Even the stories he’ll one day outlive.

But sometimes he turns to look at James and the light will catch in his blond hair like white hot fire. The form of him will seem impressed upon the air like an indelible mark. Q feels his breath leave his body. Q thinks, James ought to have stories told about him. James ought to have poems and novels and songs. James ought to have the whole universe, and never be forgotten.

 

* * *

 

Q was looking at him in poorly disguised awe.

James wiped the blood from his hands with a rag and looked back, wary. “What is it?” he asked.

“That’s the first time anything I wished for came true,” Q said.

James leaned down and kissed him, almost on whim. 

Much later, years and years later, Q said: that was the second time.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t think I can live without you anymore,” Q tells James while he’s sleeping. “You’ve ruined me. Or fixed me. Or something, I don’t know.”

James dreams on. Q wonders what about.

Lately it’s like he doesn’t know anything at all.

 

* * *

 

Q’s first memory of James is of trouble. It’s of a thing more dirt and dying than human and alive. It’s of a terrifying strength, buried in a worthless, flimsy shell. It’s of the scent of blood and, beneath that, some other fragrance, distant and nostalgic.

“My, my,” Q said, examining the thing laid out before him. “What a mess.”

For a moment he had glimpsed the fabric of the universe and seen that everything was tangled and inseparable. He had seen himself there, caught in the threads and being steadily dragged down. He’d felt more than he’d known that even this had been inevitable, from the very start. It had all been preordained.  All that was left was a single choice.

But even that, he thinks a little bitterly, has never been much of a choice.

 

* * *

 

“Your comet comes this year,” Q says one night.

“I know,” James says.

He runs his fingers through Q’s hair, teases one curling lock between his thumb and forefinger.

“Where do you want to go?” Q asks, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “For the end?”

“It doesn’t matter,” James says.

“It does,” says Q. “It does.”

 

* * *

 

They go to the place that once was Scotland, to the patch of land where James had once been a child, long, long ago. It’s different now, of course. It could be anywhere else in the world if not for things like latitude and longitude and the memories the body keeps, that orient it always against some fixed point.

James and Q pick their way through overgrown grass and broken debris, along the dusty remains of roads that disappear entirely in the shadows of the hills. They build fires and watch the sparks leaping out of the blaze, fading back to ash even as they stretch up desperately toward the sky. James and Q sit and sleep under the stars. They wait, and feel small.

If they’re silent, it’s the silence of two people who have nothing left between them that remains unsaid.

 

* * *

 

The comet arrives, as it was always going to.

“It really is beautiful,” James says, watching it inch through thick black space.

“Was it worth waiting for all these years?” Q asks.

James’ face is turned away, so Q can’t see his expression when he says, “No. But other things were.”

“That’s good, then,” Q says. He feels light, somehow. Unburdened. “I’m glad.”

They stand in silence underneath the comet’s blazing arc.

“I suppose that’s it then,” James says after a while.

“Once it disappears,” Q says. “There’s still a little more time.”

James turns away from the comet and he’s smiling slightly. Q’s chest throbs painfully and for a moment he thinks they might both be dying.

“You’re missing it,” he says.

Only, the comet’s light is bright enough in the moonless sky that it illuminates Q’s face, glides tenderly across his cheekbones, and James says, “I’m not.”

Q is torn between the two – between James’ expression, soft and adoring, and the comet high above the crown of his head, beginning to fade bit by bit along with the remaining seconds of James’ life. Q can’t watch them both, and both of them are slipping away quicker than he can stand. He feels something deep inside of him starting to break.

Q hears, on the surface of James’ mind, a phrase beginning to form.

_I wish…,_ James thinks.

The comet vanishes from sight.

Q closes his eyes.

And then the orbits and cycles and rotations, the tedious crawling motions of far off celestial bodies infinitely older and infinitely lonelier and infinitely more powerful than Q –

they all begin anew.

 

* * *

 

Trepidation:

  1. Anticipation, especially that which is characterized by fear;
  2. An archaic astronomical term once used to describe the movements of the celestial spheres, the rotations of which ancient astronomers believed took thousands of years.



**Author's Note:**

> I finally got around to finishing reading the original xxxHolic series and it was just as upsetting as I was led to believe if not more so. This story immediately came out of that. So if you see resemblances, that's why, ha ha ha!
> 
> Follow me on tumblr @[double-ohs](http://double-ohs.tumblr.com)


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